Transition: Complete

The past couple of months have been pretty interesting.  I’ve moved back to Alabama after excepting to take my old job back with a bigger salary.  Even with the increase, it wasn’t an easy decision.  I toiled with the idea day and night.  I called and asked other people’s thoughts and opinions.  My family was all in for me going back.  Some of my friends not so much.  My friends knew of the drama I had with the job before and all of the ish that went on.  I went back to Atlanta not looking back and hoping to start my life over there.  God had other plans….

I really enjoyed myself at Georgia Tech.  My coworkers were pretty cool and I got to work for one of the most internationally recognized universities in the world.  I learned alot more about admining linux servers thanks to my boss.

All in all, I’m enjoying being back.  The people are super nice and friendly as usual and most people (as I knew would be) were happy to see me come back.

Moving back  has put a new spin on things with my life and put some other things on hold.  I’m back to having no social life, but being an introvert, it’s the least of my worries.

It’s Over. Here is the Official Score.

Calculus II —————————– C

Dynamics —————————— C

Circuits II —————————— C

Electronics II ————————– D

I was slightly peeve about the D in Electronics, but it was expected.  Ah well. I am very glad and thankful to the Lord that I got out of the other classes. *phew*

I’ll be spending my Xmas break here in good ole Skegee.  My parents are planing stay a week in Florida and maybe even stay longer.  I can’t do that, I’ll get bored, besides, I have things to do here in Skegee.

Othello, Khaliah and Daniel is also staying here and a good friend, Veronica, of mine sent me an ISCA mail telling me she is going to be in down during the break. Cool. Today, I was thinking about having Christmast dinner at my house (since I got paid for the work I did in the T-Cam lab) and inviting Khaliah, Othello, Daniel, and Veronica. I also have an option of eating at the Jimmehs, Aaron’s house or going to Montgomery and eating with the Smileys.

Daven dropped by Othello’s. I think he is staying the night but leaving tomorrow.  He’ll be back in January and he and Othello have made plans to see “Lord of the Rings” and invited me to go.

Daniel and I have started working on “The Project.”  The “Project” is to setup and configure a domain with an email and web server and serveral clients. The details are on the web site.  So far so good, we have most of the major hurdles out of the way such as DNS and Mail (with a few issues). We’ve done alot of work, so I think I’ll stop for a minute and document what we have done so far and post it to the web site. I also have some other projects like completing the photo and belief links on my web page, upgrading Fire, (I forgot to get the key to the server room before I left work Friday *UGH*) and installing Solaris on a box.

Birthday Wishes

Another birthday has come and gone.  No one even called. I got a couple of birthday wishes, but after I told them it was my birthday.  I don’t know how I should feel about that.  I figure birthday’s get less important as you get older. My brother remembered and sent me an ecard.  My parents sent money (mostly to help out with rent and utilities), and Florida Grandma sent me some money as well (recieved it Friday).

I started working on Tuskegee’s University’s NSBE Chapter Web Site.  I really like doing web pages and can even see myself doing it for a living, but I much prefer messing around with Unix boxes and such.  The love I once had for electrical engineering is fading, though I still find some parts of it interesting. My goal is
to have my own buisness doing something, fulfilling a niche or something.  Me and Lutalo will have to do some braintstorming.  He has some ideas.

Got a call from the T-Cam Lab tonight. They need help with some license issues with their Sun Boxes.

My Mid term exams didn’t go well at all. I had a calculus II test Tuesday that I will be diligently preparing for. I may end up dropping Probs and Stats… What an icky class!!! It’s not likes it’s hard. I just don’t put alot of effort into it. What am I doing then…. *sigh* I am so tired of school.

We went to Hurtsboro this past Sabbath for their Youth Day. We had previously
plan to attend Bethany SDA Church in Montgomery, but Anthony spoke with Richard and told him that Youth Federation was next week in Montgomery.
So we decided that we’ll go next week. BIG MISTAKE.

Service in Hurtsburo was pretty dry and as usual, there wasn’t enough food. Still hungry, the college kids opted to go home and get some more food. On the way back, I became nausiated and was feeling pretty bad.

On the ride back, Zahra told me that Mono and Digliserides aren’t from pork as I had previous thought and was told.  She spoke with one of her professors and we had a little debate about it in the car.  I even asked Anthony while we were grocery shopping and he told me that it wasn’t from pork, but might as well be because it’s a bad fat. I’ve been avoiding it pretty much anyway.  Ah well.

Busy

Well, I am been pretty busy the past couple of weeks studying for test and doing homework.  School is becoming very demanding even with 16 hrs.  And all of those are tough classes.  But I am sucking it up because I want to get out of here.

John was by the house last night when I got back from a study session.  He, Othello and myself were talking about plans after school, like getting married, grad school and getting a job and stuff like that.

I’ve been working on Tuskegee University’s Solar Decathlon’s web site.  It is going pretty well.

I had three exams last week. They…. went….well, they just went!

It has been CRAZY the last few days.

Was playing with video streaming all last week. I wanted to be ready if graduation was going to be web casted. My first attempt at streaming was successful by carefully following the directions. I used Sorenson Broadcaster 1.1 on an iMac with a DV camera connected to it in the office.  I was going to put it on the G4, but it was busy computer in the office.  I didn’t have direct access to the Server Emmanuel used to stream last graduation with, so I decided to download Darwin Streaming server for linux and install it on Domino. Installation and configuration is pretty much effortless, as you would expect from an Apple product. Big ups to
Apple.

I configured Domino to stream on port 80 for those behind firewalls.  After creating the SDP file on the iMac, I SCP’ed it to Domino in the /usr/loca/movies folder.  Following the directions in the Sorenson manual, I went over to the G4, loaded the QuickTime Player and typed in rtsp://domino.dhs.org/movie in the open URL dialog box. After I clicked ok, it began to stream, but I wanted to put this in a html document. I read further… While the streaming was going on in the QuickTime Player, I went file and save movie. This is necessary if you want to embed the stream in a html document. I selected self-contained movie as per direction. From the G4, I SCP’ed the test.mov file over to the root of my virutal web server, megaduce. There I created a simple html document that contained:

<html>
<body>
<center>
<embed src=”test_movie.mov” width=”320″ height=”240″ target=”QuickTimePlayer”>
</center>
</body>
</html>

After that, I went around the office that had QuickTime installed and fired up IE and pointed it to movie.html on my box. It worked!!! Now to see if it worked off campus. It was impractical to run home at the moment to test, so I launched MSN and AOL Messenger to find someone. I found a few, none of them could see it. Then Emmanuel came online. I asked him to pull it up.  Strangely, he pulled it up. Baffled and tired, I decided to go home and rest and ask Geoff about it in the morning.

The next day rolled around and I talked to Geoff about the problem. He told me that the firewall (WatchGuard FireBox II) was not configured to allow rtsp protocols through which was port 554. And I was like, yeah and I have the box configured to use port 80, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Anyway, I had some people try to connect again, and we would monitor the results on some monitoring program for the FireBox. True enough people were trying to get in on port 554 and were being denied by the firewall.  Luckily, Emmanuel logged on while I was running back and forth between my computer and the server room. I got him to connect and I saw on the firewall that he was able to get through…. ON PORT 80. I told him the situation and he said that he automatically had this QuickTime Player to play on port 80. DUH. So then it hit me. What if I put: rtsp://domino.dhs.org:80/movie instead of rtsp://domino.dhs.org/movie when I opened the URL stream in QuickTime Player. I SCP’ed the new movie.mov file over to my web box and VOILA!!!! People off campus can see it now! I was happy and I felt like I accomplished something. If only EE and Calculus came to me that easy.

*SIGH*

More later ….

YAH!!! 3 more days till pay day.

This past Thursday, Christian had to go to traffic court in Clayton county Georgia. Their judicial center is NICE! I had to drive him up there because he doesn’t have his license (had them taken away; too many tickets). The reason he got a ticket in Clayton county is when he was at Hartsfield International Airport, he left his car unattended at the pickup gate.

On the way back to Skegee, I stopped off in Newnan to do some shopping and to catch my brother before work.

Our office is putting together a small video of all the labs on campus for freshman orientation. I am helping out on that. Also I will be setting up web streaming for summer graduation on Friday.

This past Friday, I figured out how to export a Quicktime movie with fast-start. I am helping Sunday with a project he is doing with the engineering department. Also worked with iDVD briefly. Going to burn some footage Sunday took in Dr. Oni’s and Dr. Giles classes to DVD using iDVD.

I also started a new look for this site.

I am so behind on this journal…

Nick was down the weekend before last. He came to Tuskegee after the 5th. He was down just visiting before he leaves for the Army. He graduated in May.

Asia is doing well. She is bad as ever and she is getting big. I took her to the vet last Wednesday for vaccination and deworming. She is pretty healthy and a big ball of energy. I have to go back in about a week and a half to get her second set of shots. I am considering getting her vaccinated for kitty leukemia.

Sunday just got two new G4 machines in his office. He got them to do delivery of quicktime movies of professors teachings so students can go back and review the class over the web. On of the G4 has the SuperDrive and the other is has OS X Server. And OS X Server is pretty nice.

I watched Steve Jobs MacWorld NY Keynote address today. Apple basically did speed upgrades across the bored.  One of Apple’s guys did a pretty impressive demonstration on the “Megahertz Myth.” I always new that the PowerPC G series were more efficient processors compared to their Intel counterparts, but his presentation was very simple. I am glad Vinod was able to see the Keynote. He said he was very impressed. Hopefully we (we being the mac people in the office) will be able to fully win his heart over to Mac.

This past Sabbath, Richard and I visited the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Auburn. It was very refreshing to visit a new church and see new faces. We saw Dawn. I haven’t seen her since last August. She is finishing up at Auburn University in August. Anthony was there with his friend Lanissa.   She seems to be pretty cool. We may go back this coming Sabbath.

I was suppose to start my “summer vacation” this past Monday, but Dr. Webster wasn’t ready for us last week so I had to move my vacation up two days so we could get started on his lab in the Vet School. So Wednesday was going to be my start day, only I forgot to get a price quote request ready for the Dean of Engineering to upgade one of the IBM Netfinities to run some database application (I think), that needs to be installed Monday. Well I had no idea where I was suppose to get the price quote from and the boss left the office early Tuesday afternoon before I could ask him. I was finally able to reach him today to get some information on what I needed to do. Needless to say, I got the price quote. Then my boss tells me I need to be the one to install the hard drives (and configure them for RAID) and install the memory. The memory I could do no problem, but configuring a RAID setup was another story since I’ve never done it before. And besides that, I am suppose to be on vacation. Ah, the joys of working in IT.

On Mail and Movies

This week, I’ve been reading up on Sendmail. It’s a mail transport agent for Unix type OS. The documentation is convoluted and complicated making it difficult to get SMTP up and running fast. Or maybe it’s just me. I borrowed Daniel’s O’Reilly book on Sendmail written by the author. It’s no help. I got frustrated with it and started to search the HOW-TO’s on how to setup SMTP and POP3. Most of them recommened qmail. So I started to read the docs on it. Well, last night, I was successfully in getting the earth box act as a SMTP and POP3 serve (oooo, but it wasn’t easy). YAH!!! Thing though, it’s not recieving mail from host of campus. =(

The urgency in getting a SMTP and POP3 server configured because TuskegeebInternet, a local ISP shop in Tuskegee, AL, has requested my help in helping them get their email server back up and running. Their whole ISP setting is running on two linux boxes. One is the web and email server and the other is the dial up and something or other server. Their email server is down, and they need help to get it back online. The thing is, I didn’t know a thing about sendmail (I just assumed it was running it) and how to set it up, though it was on a list of goals I wanted to learn, and I still want to learn it.

I saw Fight Club last night. It was….. OK. I actually liked the movie until the point where Tyler was actually the guys alter pyscho personality. I believe the movie would have been better if the anti Tyler was actually a real person. That would have created a more interesting conflict to me.

My First Blog Entry

So much has happend. I am a tad fustrated with this issue over my work contract at the University. I still go into the office though and, show my face, help out a bit, learn some more Unix.

I got a contract on Wednesday. The dates on the contract are, May 14th throught June 11th. WHAT THE FREAK?!!?! June 11th is the start of summer school. Aaron and Abraham were suppose to discuss it with the powers that be the next day. Well, Aaron was sick and I don’t know if Abraham found out anything. I am almost to the point that I could care less. Of course, my options are quite limited, idealy anyway…

I was going to church today, but I never made it out of bed. I know, sorry excuse. I needed the time alone anyway.

Othello invited me over for movies and popcorn last night. We saw “A Thin Line Between Love and Hate and a TIGHT Kun Fu Flick. I dont’ remember the name, but I throughly enjoyed it.

Oh yeah, O asked me to write a little something something for his magazine. I’ll (probably) post it when I write it.